In its first step towards digitisation of registration process, the Meerut Regional Transport Office (RTO) is all set to update its present Vahan 3.0 web-based system of vehicle registration to Vahan 4.0. At present, all registration procedures take place manually and the office keeps all records on paper, which is time consuming and requires a lot of space. The Vahan 4.0 will be enabled with e-payments of taxes, fees, uploading of all scanned documents on a centralised server.

Giving information, assistant regional transport officer (ARTO) Ranjeet Singh, said, "We will implement the Vahan 4.0 step by step. In the initial level, all payments of fees and taxes will be made through net-banking and 17 banks have been selected for this. In the next phase, the entire registration process will take place through the system without any manual labour."

Until now, a dealer used to collect documents like identity proof, pay the fees and taxes of customer and submit it to the RTO. Currently, it is being done manually and takes a lot of time. It also means additional work for transport office for keeping and maintaining records of registration documents. Once implemented, this will reduce the dealers' work and they will be able to pay taxes and fees online after uploading documents on the portal.

VAHAN is the flagship e-Governance application under National Transport Project, a Mission Mode Project initiated in year 2006. The purpose of the application was to automate the RTO operations related to vehicle registration, permit, taxation, enforcement in the whole country. "We have received the guidelines from Lucknow headquarters and are in the process of updating our software. Necessary requirements of computers and printers are also being made. Once this is done, payment of fee and taxes will be done via internet," said Singh.